The Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at Kelvin Smith Library has announced the recipients of the 2024–25 Freedman faculty and student fellows. The annual fellowship program supports advancing digital scholarship research projects from Case Western Reserve University faculty and students. The fellowships aid researchers in integrating digital tools and technology into their work across multiple disciplines to support learning and advance scholastic discoveries.
The 2024-25 Freedman Faculty Fellows program is generously funded by the Freedman Fellows Endowment, established by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman.
This year’s Case Western Reserve University faculty recipients are:
Erika I. Barcelos
Research Assistant Professor
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Case School of Engineering
Project title: “Leveraging satellite imagery and health data to monitor the influence of ambient temperature on mortality rates in the United States”
A data-driven approach leveraging open-source datasets will be used to investigate the relationship between population mortality and ambient temperature rates in the United States. Health data related to underrepresented community locations (via Census and Zip Code data) will be cross-correlated with ambient temperature (collected either monthly or yearly) via satellite and ground level to generate visualizations, trends and patterns.
The findings will be related and mapped to locations such as red-lined areas and additional subsets including vulnerable populations (high social deprivation or social vulnerability indices) and their spatial distribution in the United States.
Ayesha Bell Hardaway
Professor of Law
CWRU School of Law
Director of the school’s Social Justice Law Center and its Criminal Defense Clinic
Project title: “Oral Histories and Mappings: The Winston Willis Project”
The land in and around Case Western Reserve University has been shaped by city planning, legal actions and community development decisions, with eminent domain actions playing a factor in the continuously changing landscape. The Social Justice Institute (SJI) looks to shed light upon the economic and geographical changes on Cleveland’s East side that have affected minority business owners throughout the last six decades.
One prominent example of these actions is the impact on Winston E. Willis and his businesses. Willis was a self-made businessman who created a prosperous Black neighborhood on Cleveland’s East Side for residents to enjoy. This research project, a long-established interest to the lead researcher and a broad section of community members, aims to identify any institutional and systematic ways that Willis’ businesses were rendered defunct. SJI also plans to document the view of Cleveland’s Black business landscape on and around Euclid Ave between (E. 105th and Mayfield Road), focusing on Willis’ businesses.
A key component of this project includes collecting oral histories from Cleveland residents to create a picture of the once-thriving Black establishments. This project aims to undo prior efforts to erase an important part of Cleveland's history and restore a hole in the historical record regarding Black businesses between approximately 1960–85.
Clara M. Pelfrey, PhD
Professor, Division of General Medical Sciences, Center for Medical Education
Collaborative Center for Clinical Investigation
CWRU School of Medicine
Evaluation Director, Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Northern Ohio
Project title: “Do leadership programs create future leaders? Tracking the career success and leadership outcomes of women faculty who have participated in the FLEX Leadership Development Program for Women Faculty in the CWRU School of Medicine”
The goal of leadership development programs is to create leaders; however, few programs have sufficient workforce, tools or time resources to demonstrate that their participants eventually become leaders. Typically, the evaluation of leadership programs focuses on participants’ immediate learning, satisfaction with the program and perhaps, short-term promotions. Developing participants into leaders takes years, during which programs often lose touch with former participants. Surveying participants for their leadership outcomes after several years generally results in low response rates and incomplete data.
This project will evaluate the leadership outcomes of the FLEX Leadership Development Program for Women Faculty in the CWRU SOM.
The program has successfully measured significant increases in leader self-efficacy in FLEX participants at the end of training and up to one year following completion. The hypothesis is that this project can measure the proportion of FLEX participants who have successfully become leaders by tracking their leadership outcomes using specialized software and artificial intelligence (AI) tools in combination with data captured from business networking websites. Whether participants have become leaders in medicine is a critical long-term outcome for the FLEX Program.
Applied more broadly, every leadership and training program seeks to improve its ability to highlight program success by gathering data to confirm the successful trajectories of their students, trainees or participants. If successful, this method could become semi-automated, providing an enormous service by saving both time and money on tracking the outcomes of program graduates and participants.
The 2024-2025 Freedman Fellows student program has been generously endowed by Walter Freedman and Karen Harrison.
This year’s Case Western Reserve University student recipients are:
Olatunde David Akanbi
PhD student researcher
Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production at the Solar Durability and Lifetime Extension Center
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Case School of Engineering
This project focuses on enhancing precision agriculture through the integrated geo-spatiotemporal modeling of nutrient flows while addressing environmental sustainability. It aims to optimize fertilizer use, improve crop yields and reduce nutrient contaminants in our water systems by integrating satellite imagery and other data to monitor crop health and soil nutrient flows at the U.S. scale.
The project will develop advanced geo-spatiotemporal models to track nutrient flows in agricultural landscapes, providing valuable insights for sustainable agricultural practices and environmental conservation. The work aims to address critical challenges in modern agriculture by leveraging cutting-edge geospatial techniques, contributing to both agricultural productivity and environmental health. The goal is to use innovative technology to enhance agricultural systems and promote sustainability.
Micah Arafah
PhD student
Department of Sociology
College of Arts and Sciences
Life history research explores how individuals interact with cultural norms, navigate institutions, make sense of given phenomena and live their lives. There are many methods for such research, and this study will analyze nearly seven decades of private diaries written by a woman born in the 1920s and raised in the rural Midwest that document her daily life as a wife, mother and woman in post-WWII United States.
The diary occupies a unique space in the writer's personal life, balancing spontaneity and reflection, selfhood and events and subjectivity and objectivity. It grants researchers access to areas they might not otherwise reach: personal homes, individual minds and geographically dispersed locations embedded in sociohistorical context.
Given the extensive duration of her diary entries, this study will explore historical and social changes through the eyes and words of a woman who experienced the Great Depression, WWII and the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements. Pages that document meals, opinions, major events, life transitions and role identities will help show her social and personal growth while facilitating access to knowledge of phenomena, processes and meanings ascribed by her to personal, sensitive or ordinary circumstances. Her diaries can highlight how language has evolved and how these changes correlate with major historical events and social shifts. Importantly, my close relationship with her family provides an opportunity for triangulation through interviews.
This study will use OCR scanning to digitize the diaries, and NVIVO to explore changes in language over time, transcription and text analysis, and text framing of important themes with data visualization outputs using R. Interviews will not occur until post-diary analysis.
Walter Wexler
Third-year undergraduate
History Major
Undergraduate Research Ambassador
College of Arts and Sciences
The grant will fund a project investigating Wabanaki (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet Indigenous nations) naval raiding and its impacts on the colonial Atlantic economies of the early eighteenth century. Particularly, the project will explore if, or to what extent Wabanaki raids impacted the viability of English enslavement practices in Caribbean Sugar plantations like Bermuda. Additionally, it will explore the intersection between the cultural significance of the maritime world for eighteenth-century Wabanaki peoples and the military and diplomatic defense of maritime resources against colonial encroachment. The project will be presented as an interactive StoryMap production, utilizing digital and multimedia tools to make this story as accessible and captivating to a wide audience as possible.